[Pages H1366-H1369]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     U.S. BORROWS $6 BILLION A DAY

  (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. 
Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 30 minutes.)
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, forgive me as we get ourselves organized 
here. Our friends on the other side ended a little faster than we 
expected.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to do something a little dangerous. Have you 
heard the saying you should never go to bed mad? I think there should 
be another rule. You probably shouldn't come behind these microphones 
cranky, but let's have at it.
  Mr. Speaker, I have been walking through numbers after numbers. For a 
decade now, I have come behind this microphone trying to walk through 
the scale of our borrowing, the scale of what is going on. The fact 
that most of it is driven by our demographics is giving a little bit of 
an excuse. Saying that makes it so it is not Democratic or Republican; 
it is just math. At Home, I represent the Scottsdale-Phoenix area. I am 
trying to figure out what is going on in our brothers and sisters on 
the left's heads.
  I get it. They are cranky. As a former Senator that I sat next to 
from my State was sharing with me, one of the great frustrations of 
Democrats in my area is, for 15 years, they raised money and ran on 
marriage equality. Well, that is pretty much settled. They ran on the 
right to terminate pregnancies. Well, now that is in my State 
constitution.
  What do they run on now? They run on rage, apparently.

                              {time}  2045

  I want to get this out of my head before I start to walk through some 
of the math. You have a country that is borrowing about $6 billion a 
day, about $70,000 a second. In a decade, there is data saying 30 
percent of our tax receipts will go just to pay interest.
  The wheels are coming off, and, instead, the brain trust of some of 
these folks--okay, I accept the tonal quality of some of the folks out 
of the White House isn't warm and cuddly, but do you go around 
neighborhoods, offices, and stick Nazi signs on their cars?
  My wife drives a Tesla. We bought it a couple years ago. It is funny, 
at that time she got teased a bit: Oh, now you are driving an electric 
car. I thought you guys were really conservative.
  Is this where your heads are at? Sticking Nazi things on people's 
windshields? There is no way they knew it

[[Page H1367]]

was my wife's car. She just has a little BASIS sticker, which is a 
charter school my kids go to.
  This is really the quality of conversation discourse of communication 
that is going on with the leftwing activists in my community. It is 
not: Hey, David, we are concerned about Medicaid. Here are ideas how 
you can deal with the debt and deficit so we have the resources. No, 
because it is this really highbrow, intellectual discussion with our 
brothers and sisters on the other side, stick Nazi things on people's 
cars. This is what you have come down to? This is what is going on? 
Come on, people.
  Look, I almost always start with this chart. You see what is in blue? 
It is defense and nondefense discretionary. It is--we expect it to be 
26, 25 percent of spending. Last year, for every dollar this country 
took in in tax collections, we spent $1.39, but everything we vote on 
is 26 percent of the budget. Does anyone see a math problem?
  We are going to get behind the microphones and have honest 
discussions of how we are going to save the country. If it is about 
programs the left cares about, help us figure out how to pay for it. 
Yet, when you actually look at some of the spending and debt--I think I 
have the chart. We actually did some of the math.
  The crazy thing, one of my Democratic neighbors who makes a lot of 
money, he has a beautiful home: David, is it true that the President is 
even talking about going back to the 2017 tax rate for high-income 
earners?
  Well, apparently the President said something like that on Friday.
  Well, David, do you think that is fair?
  This is a guy I know is a Democrat because he has Democratic signs 
even of my opponents in his front yard.
  We did the basic math. If you actually were saying, let's just go 
back to the tax rate for the top earners back to 2017, it is $32.7 
billion over 10 years. Okay, we can all divide that by 10, so let's 
call it $3.2 billion a year.
  We borrow $6 billion a day. If that is $3.2 billion, you functionally 
bought yourself 12\1/2\, 13 hours' worth of borrowing for the entire 
year, and there is the mental breakdown. The left runs around and says: 
Raise taxes. Okay. We are going to borrow 7.3 percent of GDP, which is 
my latest number. Some of the other economists are around 7.2 percent 
of GDP. Either way, you can go to the Manhattan Institute and read the 
articles. It is from Democratic literature that if you take every tax 
they have that they have scored: Raise tax on capital gains, raise tax 
on income, raise tax on businesses, raise tax here.
  I am sorry for talking so fast. Believe it or not, I live on coffee, 
and I need to apparently deal with my issue with a 12-step group for 
coffee.
  However, the point I am going to, read the article. All those taxes 
when you do the economic adjustment is about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. 
This place lies. Excuse me, we make up math because it is really hard 
to tell people the truth. Almost every cut we talk about as Republicans 
is about 1 percent or so of GDP.
  I am enraged right now because I am hearing down the hallway the 
Senate, they are talking about doing their reconciliation budget and 
setting a floor, saying: We are not going to allow the Senate to pass 
budget cuts of less than $3 billion. Huh?
  I am upset that ours is so anemic at like $1\1/2\ trillion, but if 
they do $3 billion, it is functionally a half a day of borrowing. This 
is, yea, go team.
  Look, at some point, the math is the reality. Why is it so hard to 
tell the truth? One of the other points I sort of want to make--and I 
stole this graphic from another group, thank you. Baseline. Baseline. 
Baseline law, not baseline policy. The law. I will explain that later.
  Over the next 10 years, we are going to spend $86 trillion. We are 
talking about, at best, on the House budget resolution cutting $2 
trillion over those 10 years. That is 2.3 percent. Oh, God, dear 
Heaven, you are butchering government. It is 2.3 percent. You are 
telling me that if we didn't grind through government, look at our 
programs, look at all the reports the GAO and others have given of the 
waste and fraud and just programs that haven't been authorized in 
decades, you couldn't find 2.3 percent, but it is easier to go stick 
this sort of crap on my wife's windshield than it is to do the 
intellectual work of saying, hey, we think we have more elegant ideas 
on how to reform spending in government, modernize it, make it better, 
faster, cheaper for the American people. No, we would rather burn 
things down.
  Are we all proud of ourselves? The fact of the matter is $86 trillion 
in spending over the next 10 years, and at best our budget 
reconciliation is 2.3 percent of that spending.
  This is the one I get complaints from everyone, so please understand, 
I am trying to offend everyone with facts and math. If you do all 
this--because we have a number of Senators over there saying: Don't cut 
any spending. They are Republicans.
  When you hear someone say: We should do baseline policy, not the law. 
What they are basically saying is they don't want to have to deal with 
telling the truth of the math.
  Let's take a look here. We finished this fiscal year $37.2 trillion 
in debt as a country. Baseline, we add $22 trillion of additional 
borrowing over the next 10 years. If we were to do the tax extensions, 
which we really need to protect the middle class and others by not 
raising their taxes, but if we were to do it without any offsets and 
then you add in the interest, that is about another $6.8 trillion of 
borrowing. Then if we were to take care of the President's requests, 
that is another $8 trillion, functionally saying we will borrow more in 
this 10-year period than we did in the previous 240 years. On the day 
we are elected we are going to double 240 years of borrowing.
  Are we proud of ourselves? This is how we are going to save the 
Republic? We are going to continue to just bury it in debt because it 
is hard to tell people the truth about the math?
  I have a caveat on this board. We don't have a subscription to 
Moody's Analytics. It is expensive. Congressional Research Service 
doesn't have one, but we found four or five articles talking about 
Moody's saying their model says in 2035, nine budget years from now, 10 
years from now, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts--so you pay a 
dollar in taxes, 30 cents of it just paid interest.
  Think about that. In 10 years, 30 percent. This year, it is 18 
percent. Dear Heaven, there is a model out there that actually shows 
that if interest rates were to go up 1 percent in that nine budget 
years, it is like 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go just to 
interest.
  We are playing a very dangerous game here, but at least we can stick 
things on Teslas and protest and be angry because God forbid we talk 
about actual math.
  In 7\1/2\, 8 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. 
The law says you cut benefits. That is a 21 percent cut. We double 
senior poverty in America. How many people do you think come behind 
these microphones are willing to have a conversation of how we are 
going to save it?
  The first year, my math, actually the Joint Economic economists' 
math, the first year--so if the trust fund is gone in 2033, in 2034 it 
is over $600 billion just to make up that shortfall. That makes what we 
are talking about here in the budget resolution tiny. Those are only 
like $200 billion a year. We are talking $600 billion a year, and it 
grows just to cover the Social Security trust fund being gone.
  That is 7\1/2\, 8 years from now. Are we going to talk about that, 
though? No, because they are going to run television ads beating the 
crap out of us because we tried to figure out a way to save it. The 
perversity of this place. They don't give a damn about someone's 
future, their poverty. It is about winning the next election and 
raising money on it.
  We have got to tell the truth also what is going on in our country. 
You all saw the updates from the Census Bureau basically saying after 
next year if you zero out immigration, our number of prime-age workers 
starts to fall. As a matter of fact, there is a dataset. Now, we have 
been using 8 years from now because that was the official Census Bureau 
number.
  There are a couple demographers out there who wrote articles a week 
ago saying, we may have already hit more deaths than births in America. 
I need you to process what that means. You have a system where Social 
Security, the financing of Medicare, financing of so many of our 
pensions relies on a

[[Page H1368]]

growth of the working population, particularly those prime-age workers.
  If we are now entering a time of a shortage of young people--in 2027, 
not that long from now, we actually go negative of prime-age workers.
  Maybe our committees should maybe invite in a demographer and talk 
about saying, is this Republican or Democrat? Starting in 1990, we 
started to roll over the number of children we had. Now we are paying 
the price for it. Now make these long-run programs, which are pay-as-
you-go math, make them work.
  This should be scaring the hell out of this place. Oh, no, David, we 
can't tell our voters that. It is harder to raise money when you tell 
them the truth of how hard the future is.
  It is fixable. I have done presentation after presentation of 
adoption of technology, redesigning some of the programs where you 
don't cut anything, but you do really hard stuff. The problem is our 
hallways are crowded with people. Here it is all about the money. 
Understand, Congress is really about one thing: Money. The 
inefficiencies, the design failures for these bureaucracies, for the 
business models that make their living off government, that is their 
profit. They actually like the inefficiencies.
  We came and showed some charts I think a week or two ago just our 
calculations that there could be $25 billion a year in duplicative 
MRIs, X-rays, ultrasound scans in Medicare. Does a duplicative scan 
when it is not necessary make someone healthier?
  On the other hand, you could actually do something crazy, take the 
scan, attach it to one of these things, the little supercomputer in 
your pocket, and carry it around with you. There it is. Did that cut 
anyone's service? Mr. Speaker, $25 billion this year times 10? It is a 
quarter trillion dollars with one little reform.

                              {time}  2100

  The perversity of this place when I do that piece of legislation is 
that I will get attacks saying I am trying to cut benefits. No, I am 
trying to save the programs.
  I guess it would cause the difficulty of math, having to design and 
put something on paper, and getting some of the economists to work 
through it, but that is our job. We are the board of directors of the 
biggest economy in the world, the biggest entity in the world. We are 
going to spend over $7 trillion this year. Of course, we are only going 
to take in $2 trillion in taxes, meaning we may borrow about $2.1 
trillion, $2.3 trillion this year to keep the wheels on.
  The scale of this should be scaring the hell out of people. Look, the 
demographic curve, when we start to think right now, in 2024, we have 
2.9 people working for every person receiving their benefits. A decade 
from now, that is going to fall to 2.7, 2.6. Then, it really starts to 
crash. When we start to look at the 30-year window, we are down to 
about 2.4. That may not mean much to you, but trying to make these 
numbers work, it can be done. It is just hard.
  You are going to hear people come behind these microphones, give 
these beautiful speeches of how they want to save the Republic, how we 
care about the future, how we care about our kids, how we care about 
your retirement, and then we will do nothing that is actually hard. It 
is just immoral. It is just absolutely immoral.
  I try over and over. When I am doing these, I am trying to do a 
better job of bringing examples of where we can save.
  I am going to admit DOGE and those, I am fascinated with the data 
mining and those things. I know the quality of the gentleness or 
gentility of the communications. They have a hard, rough edge. The fact 
of the matter is a lot of the craziness actually wasn't coming from 
them. It was coming from people in the bureaucracy trying to throw out 
stuff to make it more difficult and just really anger people. Then, the 
government unions have to try to light things on fire, so disharmony.
  We have five major databases in the Federal Government. Is it 
Republican or Democrat to just build a world where those databases 
would talk to each other? If there is potential of $100 billion a year 
in misallocations and fraud and these things, and you could fix it by 
just having the databases talk to each other and know this is a 
fraudster, this person isn't with us anymore, they have gone on to 
their reward, but somehow they are out here asking for an SBA loan, is 
that Republican or Democrat? It is just technology. Yet you have 
protesters out there saying we can't allow the databases to talk to 
each other. Have we lost our minds?
  I want to do this just as an example because this one just burns me. 
Between Christmas and New Year's, I went up and spent 3 or 4 days up in 
the Navajo Nation. I took my little 9-year-old daughter. Yes, I have a 
9-year-old and a 2\1/2\-year-old. That is the definition of 
pathologically optimistic when you are 63 and have a 2\1/2\-year-old. 
It is both funny and true.
  Guess what? We have spent $42.5 billion for broadband equity. 
Remember, we always like to add that word ``equity,'' except no one has 
gotten broadband.
  The Tribal president of the Navajo Nation and a number of the 
communities called chapter houses basically said screw this. I am not 
willing to wait another 20 years. You know what they did, something 
just crazy? Instead of being patient and waiting for us to spend 
billions of more dollars and run a piece of wire, they went out and 
stuck up a satellite dish. Forty-eight hours later, for several hundred 
dollars, they had broadband for the whole neighborhood, for the whole 
what we call chapter house.
  Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just the adoption of 
technology, except the lobbyists who run around here wanting billions 
of subsidies for something they are never going to connect get really 
upset every time I do this board.
  Do we care? Does this place care enough to do the hard things, to 
actually do the math, the creativity.
  Last week, I came here with the MedPAC report. It is like this. I 
have no idea how many Members have actually bothered to read it. Yes, I 
understand there are some anomalies, but they are rounding errors 
compared to this. I think it had that $84 billion was spent last year 
in the differential between Medicare part D and Medicare part A. That 
is Medicare Fee-for-Service and Medicare Advantage. It was supposed to 
be at 95 percent. If anyone wants to go back and do their history, in 
2005, when they started Medicare Advantage, if you do that basic math, 
that is $104 billion a year.
  How about if Republicans and Democrats got together and said we are 
going to fix this, that we are going to get the capitation program to 
actually work the way it is supposed to, that we are going to have the 
providers of services actually make money because they help our 
brothers and sisters who are in their retirement years earning their 
healthcare benefits, helping them be healthier? They get rewarded by 
having their population be healthier, not by running around scoring 
with sicker. Yay, everyone wins.
  What would happen with that several hundred billion dollars over a 
decade? That is not a cut. It is actually lining up incentives. 
Instead, it is just easier to run around and scream stories that they 
are going to cut things.
  Let's pay people, so I have hospitals and other groups paying people 
to fly out here, tell stories, and they have no idea what they are 
talking about because we make crap up, once again, because everything 
is about the money.
  The last board and the one that always seems to upset people because 
they don't want to know the truth, the Congressional Budget Office--
this one is a year out of date. The numbers are actually apparently 
worse, but we haven't had the update yet. The Congressional Budget 
Office estimates that over the next 30 years our country borrows $124 
trillion. Now, I have to tell you, this number when we get our updates 
could be much worse. If you look at their data, they actually have 
discretionary, the part we vote on, growing slower than tax receipts. 
That has a $9 trillion positive over the 30 years, but Medicare is 
$87.2 trillion in the hole. Social Security is $36.8 trillion in the 
hole over those 30 years.

  It turns out, even the next decade, almost 100 percent of the U.S. 
sovereign debt growth is interest and Medicare. There is nothing we can 
do about interest. We can do some things to incentivize going out on 
the curve so we are not as fragile to communicate

[[Page H1369]]

to the bond markets because the bond markets are basically about to run 
this country. If you have to sell $6 billion a day, $60,000, $70,000 
every second, maybe you need to pay attention to your bankers who you 
are having to sell your debt to, to communicate to those debt markets 
we are serious and looking at ways to use technology, better models 
when obesity is the single biggest expense in our society. Yes, we are 
not supposed to say that. Mr. Speaker, please don't tell anyone.
  Last year, the Joint Economic economists calculated $9.1 trillion 
additional of healthcare spending. Is it moral with what we do in food 
policy, nutritional support, how we deliver healthcare? Maybe the 
concept of helping our brothers and sisters live healthier when 31 
percent of Medicare spending is diabetes--33 percent of all healthcare 
overall is just diabetes.
  Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just trying to get your policy 
alignment to the fact we are buried in debt and getting older as a 
society. I think in a decade, 23 percent of our population is 65 and 
up. We now know that we are having this remarkable shortage of young 
people. We are already potentially on the cusp of having more deaths 
than births in our country.
  In a couple of weeks, we are trying to roll out a STEM-based, talent-
based immigration bill because for the economy to grow and stabilize, 
we don't have a choice. People say, David, you are not allowed to talk 
about immigration. People won't understand it. Well, they understand 
the economic survival of you still getting your benefits when you are a 
senior. We can make this work.
  Mr. Speaker, we are now starting to run into articles saying that we 
are putting the extraordinary privilege. What are the two extraordinary 
privileges America has? Our currency--the world borrows in our 
currency, meaning the fact of the matter is when we sell debt, there is 
a demand to hold U.S. dollars denominated. Then, the second thing is 
people want to live here. They want to invest here. They want to be 
educated here. They want to be entrepreneurs here.

                              {time}  2110

  Mr. Speaker, we are now running into multiple articles saying some of 
the things we are doing, particularly our debt stack which is putting 
our extraordinary privilege of the country at risk. It doesn't have to 
be this way.
  A couple of smart economists say we have 3 or 4 more years. At that 
point the debt gets so hard to manage. The Federal Reserve last week 
took us from a 2.1 GDP down to 1.7. Just that movement is almost $200 
billion a year in tax collection. Just that GDP reduction the Federal 
Reserve calculated for the next 3 years, taking that out to 10, that is 
more money than everything in our budget reconciliation.
  The lack of understanding of the inner dynamics of our debt, the 
interest, and these dollars terrifies me because there is a path. There 
is a path for this to work, Mr. Speaker, but we are living on a razor's 
edge because we are not doing the hard work.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________